Jetpack Comments Now Available at a Launchpad Near You

The wait is finally over. You’ve been asking for it for months and we are finally ready to ship it.

Jetpack Comments has arrived!

We’re breaking down the barriers between you and your audience. When someone reads an article on your site and wants to comment, they can now use one of their existing social networking accounts to post a comment. No longer do they need to create yet another account and profile.

Since it is a large change, we are making Jetpack Comments opt-in. To activate it, just visit the Jetpack menu on your Dashboard and click the Activate button inside the Jetpack Comments box.

When activated, Jetpack Comments takes the place of your theme’s comment form in this nifty, sleek form:

To leave a comment, just click in the box and start typing.

After a visitor has written a comment, they will have several ways to identify themselves. A visitor can leave a comment as a guest¹, or they can choose to use their WordPress.com, Twitter, or Facebook account. For example:

You can also change the “Leave a Reply” heading and the color scheme of the Jetpack Comments form under the Settings → Discussion menu.

Bug Fixes

We’ve also fixed a few outstanding bugs in this release:

Multiple fixes for Sharing, such as updates for language locales on the Facebook Like button and making the More button more reliable.

Updates to the YouTube and Audio shortcodes for better URL escaping.

Update the YouTube shortcode to respect the embed settings in Settings → Media when appropriate.

Code clean up for After the Deadline.

You should see the update available in your WordPress dashboard shortly. Alternatively, you can always download the latest version of Jetpack here at jetpack.me as well.

On the Horizon

We’re always excited to bring more features to Jetpack. While we can’t provide any estimates on when these will be included in Jetpack, here are some of the additions or improvements that we are planning:

Increased customizability of the Subscription feature’s emails.

A better Jetpack management interface.

A refresh of the Sharing options.

¹ Guest commenting is still controlled by the options in Settings → Discussion; if you disable guest commenting, visitors will not be able to use this option in Jetpack Comments.

Gregory, we are investigating methods to do imports to Jetpack Subscriptions; we want to make sure we do it right for both you, the site owner, and your subscribers, so that neither of you are subjected to spammers. Please consider using the other features Jetpack offers; there’s some awesome stuff in there.

Strange issue and it may just be a fluke but shortly after this post went up, I went to a few of my sites to see the new comment options in jetpack and I did not see them yet but I did notice that all the WP sites I have with jetpack are currently slow to at a stop.
This is across three different hosts so I started wondering if the update may be causing this?
Could be a long shot and unrelated but really strange timing.

ok – things seem to be back to normal now and all the sites that are responding have a jetpack update notification. Still seems like strange timing if it is not related but wanted to check to make sure and bring it to your attention if it is.

Right now it is appearing in an iframe for me. Is that to be expected, and is there any hope of that changing? I’m asking because the “Leave a Reply” text ends up quite jarring against the rest of my theme and I don’t really see any options to fix it.

The iFrame is expected and there are no plans to change it in the near future. There are some options to change between a light, dark, or transparent color scheme and an option to change the “Leave a Reply” text in the Settings -> Discussion menu.

First: Thanks alot for listening to the users and finally releasing this feature. Great job!

Alas, the actual feature isn’t good enough. At least not for me. And it’s not what I expected. It takes a couple of seconds (at the LEAST) for it to load whenever someone tries to post a comment. And also, when the comment is posted, the user is directed to jetpack.wordpress.com, or at least something from there is loaded.

I want my comments to be integrated ONLY on my blog (when I’m not using “post as wordpress account” ofcourse). So I’m afraid I won’t be using this.

In order for us to provide social networking logins, we need to authenticate the logins. To authenticate those logins, we need to talk to the social networking service’s API’s. Those require oAuth keys.

If we had released Jetpack Comments fully embedded on your site, you would have had to go to each service and obtained your own oAuth keys. If we then add another social network service in a future update, you’d have to go get another oAuth key from another provider.

Needless to say, for a lot of folks, this is overly complicated. We simplified it by posting comments through our service so that we can use our oAuth keys. It reduces the amount of work needed to get this module working and to give people the ability to use social networking logins on their sites.

I just don’t get it, what is it that the comments needs to load from the server? I’ve only tested with myself manually typing in name, mail and website. Still it has to load from jetpack.wordpress.com.

If I want that kind of comment feature I’d switched to disqus a long time ago.

On chrome & firefox I also am not able to authenticate via twitter, facebook or wordpress (endlessly loading “connecting to “).
On safari it works fine, so I’m guessing it’s due to the option “disable third party cookies”, which is enabled in most browsers these days by default. Any solution for this?

Currently, because of the way we authenticate social networking logins, you need to enable third party cookies or make an exception for the WordPress.com domain. When we tested Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, we found that, by default, third party cookies were enabled.

Jetpack Comments seems to be incompatible with WooCommerce and ReCaptcha plugins, I’m afraid… Issues I noticed:

1. Product reviews/comments submitted with WP Recaptcha plugin active never show up (ReCaptcha doesn’t show either – integrating the two would be useful for users who don’t want to login with FB, WP, Twitter accounts).

2. Jetpack comment box does not appear in the blog comments section, only in the WooCommerce product review/comments section (with or without WP ReCaptcha active).

With the Jetpack comment form you also loose the WooCommerce form functionality to rate products.

It’s awesome you’ve let this happen so quickly just after the last big update with contact forms. But also I’ve got some problems.

1) I’ve got a custom made template and the comment form is placed in a normal div. But the iframe always has the height of 315 pixel which takes up a lot of space below that jetpack form. It doesn’t look good. Isn’t there a way to make the height smaller and then strech out if a comment is written? Or am I the only one having this problem?

2) Also if I try to post a comment there’s this error message: “Invalid security token”. I’ve logged out to see if the problem still exists if guests are posting and it is. Any idea what’s causing that problem? So there’s no way for me using it right now.

3) The last one, a smaller one, but still: I’ve been able to add a margin to the iframe, but isn’t there a way to change my css and overwrite the style of the heading? Didn’t work, so I figured I’ll just aks. Because the normal font of the heading doesn’t fit in with my template style one bit.

Points 2 and 3 might be related: could you remove your customization and see if the error message goes away? We currently are not supporting customizations of the comment form beyond the Settings -> Discussion options.

You can visit your WordPress Dashboard, go to the Plugins menu, then click on Add New. In the Search box, type in Jetpack, then click install. It should run through a few things and then the Jetpack plugin will be installed for you.

The new Jetpack Comments is very slick. Glad you guys fixed the embedded media sizing issue too.

Sadly, http://jetpack.wordpress.com/jetpack-comment/ (the wordpress.com domain itself actually) is blocked in China, which means visitors in China literally can’t comment through Jetpack Comments even without using WordPress.com/Twitter/Facebook authentication because the iframe comment form goes to http://jetpack.wordpress.com/jetpack-comment/ before redirecting back to the site. We perhaps could get around this by having our theme serve the original comment form vs. the Jetpack Comments form depending on user IP though…

The bigger problem is that we were originally considering Jetpack Comments in order to limit commenting to people who authenticate with Twitter or Facebook, to somewhat discourage undesirable commenting behaviors by forcing people to use their social media profiles (or go through the hassle of creating a fake one if they’re that persistent). However, it doesn’t seem like there is a way to disable anonymous commenting or the guest commenting option unlike in wp.com (http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/post-comments-twitter-facebook/comment-page-2/#comment-130403).

We tried checkmarking the “users must registered and logged in to comment” discussion setting but that just replaces the commenting form entirely with “You must log in to post a comment.” and replaces “Reply” with “Log in to reply”. Clicking on that just brings users to the wp-login.php page. We were hoping it would leave the comment form with the WP/Twitter/Facebook authentication options but without the email/name/website fields so people can still log in through those services and would have to before they could post/submit their comment. We don’t currently want people to register user accounts on our blog itself.

Are we overlooking anything here or is our assessment of what Jetpack Comments is capable of correct? Is there a way to disable guest commenting while retaining WP/Twitter/Facebook authentication?

Again, while it may not meet our needs, its a great addition to Jetpack. Just wanted to share our questions to double-check we’re not using it wrong as well as our positive feedback.

I agree, that highlighting authors would be good. Would also be good to highlight registered users. I do that on many of my blogs where the only people registered on the site are authors and I’d like them highlighted as such. This would be fine if I had to list the authors, author IDs or author emails in order to identify who should be highlighted.

Also, I haven’t played with this completely, but on all the sites I’ve seen it it defaults to my WordPress.com profile login if I’m logged in (which I always am). Is there a way I can have it default to something other WordPress.com? For example, on some sites I want the default form, and on others I might want Facebook to be the default.

If you are logged in to your self-hosted site, it should default to that login. If you aren’t logged in locally, we look for a WordPress.com login. Otherwise, the form gives the login options. There aren’t any options for this currently.

Strange, it should work on tweenty ten and eleven without any modifications. Are you sure that you enabled them in jetpack, and plese make sure no other comment systems are installed. If you need more help just contact me.

First of all, thanks for this much awaited feature in Jetpack. I had to make changes in my theme to be able to use the comments form. Now I’m facing another issue. The jetpack is not showing existing comments at all. It is only showing the comment box.

hi
great Update but in my blog there seem to be an issue after useing this i get an error
Slow down, cowboy! Speed kills.
and nothing happens ( no comment added or anything )
bowadh7a.net
every thing is uptodate

While I wholeheartedly welcome the feature, I have to chime in with other commenters – having the form (and data processing) go through wordpress.com makes this feature a no-go for me.

Apart from the fact that I don’t like “forcing” my users to accept that their data is being transmitted to wordpress.com servers (which in some countries would require truckloads of data privacy agreement addendums), the loading times outside the US are less then stellar (compared to the quick loading times of my blog itself) and even though it tries to mimic the look & fell of my blog as good as it can, it completely ignores the custom webfont I’m using.

So for now, it’s definately a great feature for less technically savvy blog owners out there, but for me it lacks advanced features (e.g. using my own Facebook App ID or Twitter Site ID) so that oAuth doesn’t have to go through wordpress.com.

This is a hugely positive step in the right direction, for which I commend you. However, that said, I feel it requires more extensive ID options, e.g. Google+, OpenID, Disqus etc., plus the option to tweet/Facebook wall/G+ your comment. I hope that this functionality will be added (and that WordPress in general becomes far more socially integrated). Until then I’ll continue to use Disqus on my blog as it offers users far more options.

It took me a while to get it working with Kubrick, but it’s a great feature! I’ve got a follow-up question, however, is it possible to change the account to comment? I’m always logged in to my blog, but I would like to post comments with my FB account. As far as I noticed to do so I have to log off my blog and then choose commenting with FB. Can I change it somehow? Or maybe there is an option I didn’t see?

Could you contact us through our support form and let us know what theme and other plugins you are using? You should also try disabling all other plugins and changing to the Twenty Eleven theme to see if that fixes the issue. Thanks!

This is a good first cut at integrating multi-platform commenter identities, but as a commenting tool in general, it comes up a little short. Jetpack Comments doesn’t appear to have any live preview function, nor does it work and play well with the few live comment plugins that are extant.

Few quick questions. Is there any way to use the feed burner subscription check mark with this (like I currently use?) I also have a gravatar reminder under my current email box. Any way to add that? Is there any way to make the social log in icons larger? And can I change the “leave a reply” wording to something else? Thanks so much!

Whenever I enable the new Comments feature, my “Post Comment” button just stops working. You type whatever you want to comment on (while logged in with my WordPress account).. and click the “Post Comment” button..aaaand nothing happens. No loading, nada. I also don’t see the three social network icons to the bottom right of the comment box. Is that important?

I’m having a bit of an issue with the spacing of Jetpack comments. http://huntermastery.com/reviews/wow-secrets-truth-scam.html as you can see at the bottom just under the Leave a Reply there is this massive box that drops just under it. When you click to reply it fill this pace some what. How to I remove this space? The space is there even if I remove all my CSS, which I’ve done and tested. I upload a blank styles.css file and the space was still there. I thought maybe it was an theme issue, so I tested that, changing to the default them, space was still there. Maybe it’s plugin, so I disabled every plugin but Jetpack and the issue is still there.

Looking at this page, there is a very small space between the comment box and it opens up pushing the footer down when you click inside of it. So how do I fix this? It really makes my layout look horrible, I’m running the latest version of WordPress, all my plugins are up-to-date. I just don’t get it, even if I try to control the height of the iframe, making it small doesn’t help, the space at the bottom is still there.

Having a small problem with this plug in. After activating jetpack comments, I decided that my current Facebook integration solution better fit my site. After I deactivated jetpack comments, the comment iframe was still showing instead of my normal contact form. I tried reactivating it, deactivating it. Deactivating the entire jetpack plugin and reactivating it… no change… well.. slight change… now the box is all greyed out and says… “invalid request signature”.

Weeeeeeeellllllll shoot…. I don’t know what in the internetz happened but your right… It’s fixed now. I do have a cache plugin and was clearing that and my browsers cache over and over… Even went to a different computer…. Hmmm… Oh well. Guess its just gonna go down in history as one of the great unknown mysteries of the universe… Like where babies come from!

Update; I think I figure it out why there is the space at the bottom, that’s the iframe which has a set height of like 315 for login users and 400 something for none. I’m not sure why it doesn’t close all the way. I looked at a few other sites running Jetpack Comments and noticed that the iframe height set in the code itself is 91px when closed, and then to 435 when you open it.

Doing some digging on how to control the iframe height, that this is a script call doing it, and testing it on my two wordpress installs (on two different host) I learned that the code is there but it’s not working, my guess is that maybe because I’m on a Network install? I’m going to test installing a none mutiesite wordpress and see if it works there. If it does then why doesn’t it work with wordpress running as a network?

First, awesome! I’m glad to finally see this, I’ve been a big proponent of this getting made available through jetpack.

As some others have said there are somethings that bug me… I know its probably not the “jetpack or Automattic way” but I’d far prefer to oAuth directly, and even better would be to allow us to setup oAuth directly and then fall back to WP.com if it wasn’t setup. Similarly I’m wary of it completely swapping out the comment module which breaks a lot of other comment related plugins…

I’ll continue to check it put, mine are just initial impressions, still as I said up top, super excited have it as an option.

I’d love to see AWeber integration. I was able to add a custom “Subscribe” checkbox for my email list before, and I’d like to include that sooner than later once again.

That said, this is fixing my one big problem — letting users leave comments from their social profiles! I checked and it works with the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin, which is my biggest must-have for commenting at the moment.

Three items to make it better. One is to allow the site owner to default it posting the comment and linkback to their FB or Twitter account. Two is to set an option to put the comment box at the top of the comments. On a page like this or like many of ours that have 500+ comments scrolling to the bottom to comment is frustrating. Three is to set it up to load comments in batches of about 50. That way the page doesn’t take 2 minutes to load when there are 500 comments.

On my site (www.spinecomic.com) the avatars don’t show up, if someone logs in and comments. Also, the “log out” option isn’t there either. But the comments show up with the proper login with social media options. What could be causing this? Any thoughts?

Scratch that, comments_form() wasn’t working…I wonder why? DOH! Anyway, I have JP social media commenting working, but I have the same trouble that everyone else seems to be having with the space below the comment box.

Someone help me! I’m using the plugin JetPack and would like to appear reply comments, for users to interact between Yes, as I see here. I have to have another plugin or extension? Help Me I’ve tried everything and nothing: (

I’m loving the new functionality of the new Jetpack comments, but it’s really annoying that I can’t customise the appearance at all with CSS, what with it being in an iframe. It can make it sticks out like a sore thumb on heavily customised themes. Hope you’ll be able to add the ability to add custom CSS in an update soon!

Custom CSS is not likely to be an option in the near future, though we do have some updates on our roadmap to make Jetpack Comments smarter about how it picks its theme colors. Thanks for the feedback!

I can’t for the life of me figure out how to edit my php to get this plugin to work. I know I at least need to add the line “comment_form();” somewhere and I need to delete some lines somewhere. But the php is just too confusing for me. I can’t get the form to appear at all, and the whole background of the site turns from white to gray when I start messing with the code.

What I really want to do is after successfully implementing Jetpack comments (I hope), is to then implement facebook commenting with the following two plugins:

They allow you to post to facebook profile, and the comment form looks like facebook form. But on the blog the submitted comment appears the way your native comments look (which at this point would be the jetpack look). I hope Jetpack comments is compatible with that.

Think it should have captcha. Easy questions/answers from me/owner. Like: “what is the name of this site” (answer without .me) = [___________] (of course the answer is “jetpack” in this case)
“what is it a picture of in the header” = [___________]
See – if we could set our own questions/answers we will get 99% of spam gone before Akismet and not much to check for ‘false positiv’ in trash.

Have tested several addons trying to get captcha. Reason is, yes Akismet do take almost all spam, but whats the use of that, when i need to go in trash and look for ‘false positiv’ anyway. When you get like 50-100 spam a day you easy can stop with a question, i dont see reason for not implement it.

Hi Thanks for the answers. I am using Version 21.0.1180.81 beta. According to Chrome I am up to date. I saw an elaborate entry at WordPress.org Forum that there’s a problem. What? I don’t know. http://goo.gl/FrFvm

I’ve been trying to get the Comments part to work properly on jeanhopkins.com, but the iFrame keeps redirecting to wp-comments-post.php?for=jetpack with a “Page Not Found” after logging in and posting a comment. I’ve tried re-authenticating the blog with Jetpack in case that was the issue, however it still refuses to post comments.

When I visit /wp-comment-post.php on your site, I get a blank white screen. If it were working properly and I visited it in a browser, it should send me to your site’s 404 page. Either you have a plugin that is blocking that file or your host is blocking it in some fashion.